This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Nilesh Raut
Short URLs look simple, right? But designing a scalable URL shortener that can handle millions of requests per second is an entirely different game.
I wanted something lightweight, fast, and globally unique — without depending on auto-increment IDs or UUIDs. That’s when I discovered the power of Snowflake IDs and Base62 encoding.
⚙️ Why Snowflake IDs?
Traditional databases can’t safely generate sequential IDs once you scale across multiple servers. You risk collisions or need heavy synchronization.
Snowflake IDs solve that beautifully.
They’re 64-bit unique identifiers that combine:
- Timestamp (for order)
- Machine ID (to avoid overlap)
- Sequence number (for uniqueness)
This way, every short URL gets a unique, time-ordered ID — even if generated across different instances.
So, for example:
snowflakeID = 177101848939540480
looks huge, but it’s guaranteed unique and sortable.
🔠 Base62 Encoding – Making IDs URL Friendly
A Snowflake ID is long and not URL-friendly.
To convert it into something like abc123, I used Base62 encoding, which uses:
0-9, A-Z, a-z
That means:
- Every number turns into a short, readable string.
- No weird characters — safe for URLs.
- Compact and consistent across systems.
So, 177101848939540480 → "bA7zD4"
Neat, right?
That’s how services like Bitly and TinyURL generate their neat short codes.
🧠 Why Microservices?
I also split the system into small services:
- ID generator
- Redirect handler
- Analytics tracker
Each service runs independently, making it easy to scale horizontally as traffic grows.
This is the same philosophy big URL shorteners use behind the scenes.
🔗 Full Breakdown
In my full post, I’ve explained the entire architecture, scaling decisions, database design, caching strategy, and microservice communication flow in depth.
👉 Read the full article here:
Designing a Scalable URL Shortener — Snowflake IDs, Base62 Encoding, and Microservices
Even a “simple” project like a URL shortener can teach powerful lessons about distributed systems, unique ID generation, and real-world scalability.
If you’re building backend systems, this is a great place to start learning how to scale smartly — not just widely.
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Nilesh Raut
Nilesh Raut | Sciencx (2025-11-07T06:40:00+00:00) URL Shortener Using Snowflake IDs and Base62 Encoding. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/11/07/url-shortener-using-snowflake-ids-and-base62-encoding-2/
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